There’s a long and interesting article about common Irish surnames and their derivations on the Irish Medieval History page on facebook. It’s got some snippets of information I wasn’t aware of either. I’d always assumed anyone Irish with a French-sounding name had Anglo-Norman ancestors, but apparently not:

Assimilation is the name given to the process of substitution with foreign names of similar sound or meaning like these French examples. Ó Lapáin became De Lapp, Ó Maoláin became De Moleyns, Ó Duibhdhíorma became D’Ermott. Molloy (O’ Maol an Mhuaidh) and Mulligan (O’Maoláin) became Molyneux.

There’s also a link to an interactive map of Ireland showing surnames by county from 1890 census. Label size represents relative birth counts. It can be accessed directly here: http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/ireland/

Irish History Compressed now has a Twitter feed under the rather squashed moniker of http://twitter.com/HistoryCompr (You’d think with over 500 million users the twelve-character limit on Twitter names would need to be lifted…)

That means that from now on you can get notifications of all our blog posts right there alongside your favourite popstars writing about what they’ve just eaten.